About

Home

Contact

The Wort Hotel, in Jackson, Wyoming, was the first place I began to play regular shows and actually get paid for doing it. Years before, John Fahey and Leo Kottke had sat together on the same stage, under the same lights, playing music that would shape decades of guitarists. I still remember what it felt like to occupy that same space. It was something along the lines of sleeping with a textbook under your pillow the night before the algebra test - ability through proximity.

That was in 1990, and things have rather changed since then. After five years of living out of my van and playing shows up and down the western US and Canada, my hair is much shorter and the lines on my face a bit deeper. I'm a single parent, working on a PhD, and I live in a town in Alaska that has no road access. I have a different approach now to writing and performing music. I no longer record CDs, as I want to reduce the waste headed to our landfills, and I don't charge money for my songs as a deliberate movement away from the bottom line that seems to govern so much of our daily lives.

But I keep writing them, and sing them when I play a show, and I give them away on this site. My graduate work takes me to interesting places on rather short notice sometimes, and I try to plan concerts around that travel. I do make it to Fairbanks and Anchorage now and again.

But if you don't live in those places, or even if you do, the Downloads page is full of little digital penguins waiting to waddle their way across the planet, leaving no footprints in the snow.